“Easier still—we’ll tint the film blue. Got to have sunlight to take any kind of pictures, anyway.”
So, when you see this thrill, remember that the lightning is a pin scratch, and the night effect is blue aniline dye and not by the gloom of night. As for Jupiter Pluvius, the men with the cans of water can wet down the place with equal skill.
Have you ever witnessed an exciting scene about a big building—a home or a factory—and then, in the next reel, watched it go up in smoke and flame? Yes? Some expense? Not so very much, for you haven’t seen the real building burn down at all, but only a little model of it after the scene has been acted out in front of the real building.
“The best fire effects are made in the studios, anyway,” the movie expert will tell you.
It was in a studio that the eruption of Mount Etna was manufactured. The promoters had tried taking real moving pictures of the volcano in eruption, but they were not nearly as good as the studio-made variety. These had the verisimilitude of real life, with fleeing thousands, men, women, children, and animals, pouring down its red-hot[Pg 63] sides. The films of the fleeing people were merely super-imposed on the film of the fake volcano, studio made.
You have seen your favorite heroine jump unhesitatingly off a tall cliff? Or swim an ice-choked river? You never knew she could swim. Nor does she. Another movie trick is what you have seen. Movie stars seldom do such things. Professionals, dressed exactly as they are, and made up to resemble them, do this part of the stunt for the real actors. Jumping from a burning building is another movie feat which is only a trick. The real people get only as far as the windows. Dummies do the jumping and the falling.
So! But how do they make inanimate objects move about as if they were endowed with life? How does a catsup bottle jump up from the table and climb down to the floor on the rungs of a chair? Or how can grandpa’s clock walk up the stairs, turning around solemnly the while to look you straight in the eye and give you warning of the flight of the hours?
Perhaps you have seen horses running full tilt at you and never seemed to catch up. So simple! Right in front of the horses is a high-powered automobile, in which the movie camera is set up. The horses follow the car, and the camera man grinds out his film, always keeping a few feet ahead of his charging subjects.
Prehistoric Man Now Seen in Wax.
The three great links in the chain of human ancestry in America, beginning nearly twenty thousand years back, have just been represented for the first time in scientifically reconstructed wax faces at the College of Medicine, University of Nebraska, in Omaha. This is the first reconstruction work of the kind that has been done on prehistoric skulls of America.